For all the talk that Trump has grown impatient with Putin over the ceaseless war in Ukraine, there is much this administration is lifting from the Kremlin playbook. The recent "merger" of Paramount and Skydance being a prime example. A tech oligarch will now have control over Paramount's extensive holdings including CBS. The merger clearly favors Skydance and will see David Ellison, son of Oracle tech oligarch Larry Ellison, as the CEO. Both are avid supporters of Trump and are hoping that the FCC will speed things along so that they can wrap up this deal by September.
"Varied ideological perspectives" just means CBS will be less "woke," and help further the conservative narrative when it comes to politics. This also means ditching The Late Show where Stephen Colbert had been dishing on the merger for months, calling the $16 million settlement between 60 Minutes and Trump a bribe. Trump had initially sued CBS for $10 billion over what he regarded as unfair film editing in regard to the Kamala Harris interview last Fall. It was a frivolous law suit but it was filed in a federal court in Amarillo, Texas, which meant it had a good chance of being heard, so CBS decided not to go down that road. This led to mass resignations at 60 Minutes, including the long standing executive producer, Bill Owens.
The methods are a little different but Vlad similarly shut down independent media in Russia when he took over the Kremlin in 2000. He went after the news agencies first. The state-run news agencies were easy enough. He just replaced the heads of the organizations with individuals loyal to him. The private ones took a little more effort as he had to come up with a means of bankrupting them, so he got the Duma to pass new retroactive tax laws, and filed charges of tax evasion against these organizations that eventually led to their bankruptcy. Then, he let his friendly oligarchs buy the stations at fire sales prices and reshape them into more favorable news outlets. In the end, there were very few independent news stations left inside Russia. The last of them, TV Rain or Dozhd, was shut down early in the Ukraine War for charges of being unpatriotic and briefly set up operations in Latvia before moving to the Netherlands.
All the American news channels are owned by larger media companies. CNN is owned by Warner Bros. NBC and MSNBC are owned by Comcast. ABC is owned by Disney Entertainment. None of these news channels are worth very much in today's market. CNN is currently valued at $2.3 billion. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. This is small change for tech oligarchs. The only thing that stands in their way of buying out these news agencies is the FCC, which is already caving into the President to launch "witch hunts" against media companies that he perceives as political adversaries. Only the Senate can stop him but as we have seen with the Big Beautiful Bill, Republicans opt to roll over and play dead. It is safe to say that within the next three-and-a-half years we will see dramatic changes in our "independent news media" and "late night shows" that have been so critical of Trump in his second administration. Most of these news shows are already unwatchable.
So, independent-minded Americans will be left with the same option of independent-minded Russians to seek news programs in their languages abroad if they want to see any criticism of the Trump administration and the growing conservative tide in America. I already do that in Lithuania by watching BBC and the English-speaking versions of DW and France 24. I long ago gave up on CNN, which adopted the Fox model offering mostly round table discussions with "varied ideological perspectives" that quickly degenerate into faux debates.
However, this is going to make it harder for Democrats to go after Republicans in general elections. Already they face an uphill battle in rural areas where most of the local news outlets are owned by conservative media companies. Gannett is the largest of these media conglomerates owning many local television stations and newspapers throughout the country and filtering a predominately conservative narrative through them, including syndicated conservative commentators and editorial writers favorable to Trump. As such, most of these folks hear only conservative opinion and very rarely moderate opinion. This has made these rural areas virtually unreachable for Democrats, particularly those with a progressive agenda.
Having anchored their "red states" like they would countries on a Risk board, conservative media companies are now going after "purple states" like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that they figure they can win over as they did Ohio and Florida. Hard to believe that Barrack Obama won both these states in 2008 and 2012. Democrats haven't won since. Once Republicans are able to secure the Midwest the gig is over. There will no longer be any path for a Democratic presidential nominee to win the general election. So, how does one stop this from happening?
There are no easy answers. Obama knew he couldn't win rural areas, but he figured he could chip away just enough votes to take the state's electoral college vote. Fetterman adopted the same strategy when he ran for the US Senate seat from Pennsylvania in 2022. Of course, Republicans are trying to similarly chip away at the traditional Democratic urban vote, so in many cases it cancels out as both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris found out. You have to have a telegenic candidate that can at the very least attract favorable attention. This means playing the media but that has become increasingly more difficult to do, so now many Democratic candidates resort to social media to get their message out.
This is one reason Trump would love to see an American conservative mogul buy TikTok, which is why he keeps extending the Congressional ban. Believe it or not, TikTok is valued at somewhere between $30 and $50 billion, far more than the mainstream news channels combined. Kevin O'Leary tried to put together a group to buy it, but came up well short to tempt ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. His fellow investors would have had to be American as O'Leary hails from Canada.
So here we are in a strange new world where social media now offers the last line of defense against a mainstream media largely owned by conservative media groups. Even here we find the two mainstays, Facebook and X owned by tech bros who tend to lean conservative depending on which way the wind blows. They can at any time use algorithms to make it much more difficult for Democrats to get their message out. Bluesky, Mastadon and other upstart social media companies are not big enough to give Democrats a viable option. At this point, they are mostly liberal echo chambers.
This means Democrats will have to take to the streets as Polish opposition parties did in 2023 in an effort to take control of parliament. Donald Tusk cobbled together a coalition that was able to unseat the conservative ruling party that had monopolized the news media, making it virtually impossible for Tusk to go on air except through social media. One continually hopes the same thing will happen in Hungary, where Viktor Orban has also monopolized news media and also made it difficult to spread opposition messaging on social media. These want-to-be dictators had taken their cues from Putin.
It is hard to fathom this happening in the US, so long a bastion of free press, but we live in very ominous times. It seems the best we can hope for are disgruntled conservatives like Musk who now plans to use X against Trump and his Republican surrogates in the midterm elections. At least in this way he will split the conservative vote, giving Democrats a chance to take Congressional seats in battleground districts of red and purple states. However, the only long term solution is to make the FCC an independent body and split apart these conservative media companies so that they no longer monopolize mainstream media. Unfortunately, it might be too late.
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